Vintage Coalport Embassy Teacup Saucer – Rose Pink Ground, All Over Gold Fern Chintz, Solid Gilt Pedestal Foot, Bone China, England 1950s

A Coalport teacup and saucer in bone china, rose pink beneath a gold fern chintz. The bowl is wide and shallow in the English teacup proportion, where a coffee cup of the period would be taller and narrower, with a scalloped rim and an ear-shaped handle. A short pedestal foot lifts it clear of the saucer, so the cup is held rather than set flat.

Gold ferns cover both faces of the cup and the whole of the saucer, where most gold-chintz teaware keeps the pattern outside and leaves the interior plain. The fronds are drawn open rather than solid, so the pink shows between them and the colour stays warm rather than hard; each well is left to a single larger sprig.

The gold is printed rather than acid-etched or raised, which is what makes such density possible: a printed line can be drawn as fine as a hair and repeated endlessly. Everything else was done by hand — the pink fired separately from the gold, the pedestal gilded all over rather than given the single line most cups receive. The fern is a Victorian inheritance: collecting them was a craze with a name of its own, pteridomania.

This pair was made somewhere between 1950 and 1960. The crown mark reading Coalport · Bone China · Made in England · A.D. 1750 was in use from the late nineteen-twenties until it was revised around 1960, and within that span the script pattern name, five-figure number and footed shape all point to the later end. Embassy is written beneath the crown, and 10128/C was painted in gold by hand.

Coalport China of Stoke-on-Trent, though the name had by then stopped being an address: Coalport is a village in Shropshire, and production moved to Stoke after Cauldon Potteries bought the company in 1926. The colour is the scarcer part, a pink ground needing a firing of its own and always made in smaller numbers than white, and the gold-printed mark was reserved for the heavier patterns.